5Course 5Business analyticsIntermediate
Dashboards & Data Storytelling
Build dashboards people open on Monday, and present findings so the decision happens in the room.
- Chapters
- 9
- Time
- 8 hours
- Format
- Self-paced
- Tools
- Looker Studio, Power BI, or Metabase; the principles apply to any tool
What you will be able to do
- Decide what belongs on a dashboard and what belongs in a one-off analysis.
- Design a dashboard around the decisions it supports, with the right metric definitions written down.
- Choose visual forms that are read correctly at a glance and avoid the ones that mislead.
- Build alerts and variation bands so the dashboard says when something matters.
- Present a finding in ten minutes: the answer, the evidence, the recommendation, the ask.
Chapters
9 chapters. Chapter 1 is free below.
- 1
Dashboards versus analysesFree to read
Recurring questions get dashboards. Everything else does not.
- 2
Metric definitions
Writing down exactly what 'active customer' means before anyone builds a chart.
- 3
Layout for decisions
Top left to bottom right, the one number that matters, and what to leave off.
- 4
Visual forms
What works at a glance, what needs study, and the charts to never use.
- 5
Colour, labels, and honesty
Axes that start at zero, consistent colour, and the small choices that build trust.
- 6
Variation and alerts
Bands of normal, thresholds, and notifications that people do not mute.
- 7
Performance and refresh
Keeping a dashboard fast and its data fresh enough.
- 8
The ten-minute presentation
Structure, slides that are read not decoded, and handling questions.
- 9
Capstone: a weekly business review
Dashboard plus a recorded presentation, reviewed against a checklist.
Free chapter 1 of 9
Dashboards versus analyses
A dashboard is for a question that gets asked every week and has the same shape every time: how are sales tracking against target, what is the refund rate by product, how many support tickets are open. An analysis is for a question that gets asked once: why did refunds spike in March. Most reporting trouble comes from mixing the two, building dashboards for one-off questions and answering recurring questions with one-off spreadsheets.
The test is simple. If the question will be asked again next month with new data and the same definition, it belongs on a dashboard. If the answer will change what you look at next, it is an analysis, and a dashboard would only slow you down.
Dashboards also carry a maintenance cost that nobody budgets for. Every chart is a promise that the number will keep being right. When the underlying table changes, the promise breaks silently. A dashboard with six charts that are always correct beats one with thirty that are sometimes wrong, because after the first wrong number nobody trusts any of them.
So the first exercise in this course is deletion. Take a dashboard you own, list every chart, and for each one write who looks at it and what they do differently because of it. Delete the ones with no answer. The dashboard you are left with is the one people will actually open.
Who it is for
Analysts and team leads who own reporting and want it to change what the business does, not just describe it.
Before you start
Data Analysis Foundations or equivalent. Access to any dashboard tool; Looker Studio is free.
Taught by
Paul Montero
Founder and instructor
Questions about this course
How long do I have access?
Is the dataset included?
Can I get a refund?
incl. GST, 7-day refund